Friday, June 26, 2009

Style and Focus News Bites 6/26

Style and Focus Lifestyle PR would like to send out condolences to the families of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

** Sony Comments on the Passing of Michael Jackson. Commenting on his passing, Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation, said: "Michael Jackson was a brilliant troubadour for his generation, a genius whose music reflected the passion and creativity of an era. His artistry and magnetism changed the music landscape forever. We have been profoundly affected by his originality, creativity and amazing body of work. The entire Sony family extends our deepest condolences to his family and to the millions of fans around the world who loved him." (Press Release)

** According to the London Times, a study shows that One in Five Women Choose to be Childless as Careers Takes Precedence. One in five women are remaining childless as a growing proportion choose a career over raising a family, according to the study published yesterday. The trend is most marked among women of higher social class, with better qualifications, and who were brought up as an only child. The study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that remaining childless is a lifestyle choice. In the past childlessness was due to poverty, poor nutrition and low marriage rates caused by war and emigration. The proportion of women childless in England and Wales has increased from an estimated 10 percent of a 1945 cohort to 19 percent of women born in 1960.

** Will Your Friends Influence Your Shopping Habits and Interests. That's what two marketing companies, 33Across and Media6Degrees, will be analyzing whether there is a connection between social networking sites, advertising and your friends, and they are not interested in the basic friend lists, but in interactions on the sites, taking note when a user visits a friend’s page, sends a video or exchanges an instant message. In turn, they can identify people who are friends with a company’s existing customers, and then advertise to them.

Instead of using research to identify which Web sites are popular with certain demographic targets, these companies let “the consumer do the heavy lifting for you purely because of the proximity of that customer to other customers,” Mr. Steele said. “There’s a certain traction that you get when you target consumers that you know talk to each other, that you don’t get when you advertise like you would in print.”

Advertisers, eager for any information that allows them to waste fewer ads and spend less money, are trying Media6Degrees and 33Across to see whether friendships are a better indicator of who might like their products than other indicators like age, gender, geography or interests.

It may be valuable for advertisers, but for publishers, it is not great news — tactics like this mean that advertisers can assemble promising audiences while bypassing expensive sites like, say, CNN.com or ESPN.com. And privacy advocates are complaining about online tracking, a subject Congress is examining. (New York Times)

Sixteen deserving young women were selected based on their academic achievements, community involvement, leadership qualities and commitment to continuing their education; each girl received a scholarship to the educational institution of her choice. The young women also were offered the opportunity to take advantage of a special trip to Chicago for today's awards luncheon and shopping spree at ULTA on State Street with Lyn Kirby, President and CEO of ULTA. (Press Release)

No comments:

About Me

I'm a Geek Culture Writer and Book Blogger. I love reading books and an avid reader. My interest range from: Classics to Young Adult. I also love Comic Books and I support Diverse Books.
My motto is "If it interest me, I'll read it!".